DALE HAWES

Today's theatrical lights are amazing. In some cases, it takes 32 channels of data in order to control one light. With these specific lights you can point the light anywhere on the stage robotically from the tech booth. Plus, you can change the color, Iris, template, strobe, speed of response and of course intensely of light without sending an electrician up the rafters to do it. Some moving lights can track the talent around the stage with no help from the guy in the control booth at all. Today, many lights have LED (Light Emitting Diode) lamps and many are incandescent. However some shows, like rock concerts, are now 100% LED. I think before LEDs became popular the big advance in lighting was the ETC source four collection introduced in 1992. These lights seemed to replace all the other ellipsoidals and par cans and fernalls. Source 4 ellipsoidal lights are my personal favorite. Before the '90s you hand other ellipsoidal lights like Strands and Hubs. The type of light produced before LEDs was a lamp called a tungsten halogen compressed gas lamp witch was introduced in 1911. Before tungsten halogen, the lamps were standard filament Edison type lamps. Thomas Edison gave us the incandescent light bulb in 1879. Before that theaters were lit with gas light. William Murdoch honed the process of producing gas light by extracting gas from coal 1816, so gas light was only employed for a short period of time. But gas light was revolutionary because it was far more intense than candle light and the brightness could be controlled from a central control council. By 1850 most respectable theatres are lit with gas. Also in 1816, lime light is introduced. The most intense light produced by man at the time. A mixture of two gasses lit and burning a chunk of lime would produce a crazy bright light. The term stepping into the limelight comes from these lights. Before gas light, you would light the stage with candles. During the time candles were in use a revolution in lighting happen. Someone figured out if you fill a bottle with a colored gelatin and place that bottle in front of your lamp then the light produced would be colored by the gel. Today the gels are plastic sheets but we called them gels because they used to be gelatin in a jar. When theaters were lit with candles, the candles were not intense enough to produce great colors in the light but once gas was introduced the gels really set the mood. When color was first introduced they only had 3 colors; White for day scenes, blue for night scenes and red for special effects such as a sunset or re-creating a fire or the pits of hell or the like. Around 1700 somebody figured out how to make candles using a substance coming from sperm whales. These new candles were very efficient because they didn't bend and warp in the heat of a summer day, they burned longer, they were inexpensive to buy and they didn't stink when you burned them. Before that type of candle, candles were made with talow (cow fat) these candles did not burn very efficiently and they stank like a rotting corpse when you burn them. In order to light the stage there were more candles above the stage than that were over the house to concentrate your attention on the stage. During this time it was not uncommon for the wax from the candles to drip on the performers or the audience during a performance. There were other candles made out to bees wax that did not stink but they were extremely expensive to produce and as such, we're not popular except for religious shrines. Now, candles and oil lamps were the technology to produce light available since before Jesus Christ walked on the earth, however, before the King Charles' restoration movement in 1642 pretty much all performances were lit by the sun including William Shakespeare's productions or Thespis performing in Ancient Greece. They simply built the stage so the sun shines on it at a certain time of day. In the year 534 BC Thespis of Ancient Greece was said to be the first actor to portray someone other than himself. it is believed he is the first actor and it's where we get the term thespian.

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-D. Hawes 2020